


He's A Riot

by scramjets



Category: Now You See Me (2013), The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-11
Updated: 2014-09-11
Packaged: 2018-02-16 23:41:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,164
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2288951
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scramjets/pseuds/scramjets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Disappearing is easy enough. Eduardo disappears to Singapore – puts time and distance between himself and Facebook. Mark, on the other hand, disappears altogether. Life continues on until Eduardo discovers where Mark is and who he has turned himself into. That is: a magician who robs banks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	He's A Riot

**Author's Note:**

> TSN Big Bang 2014. All thanks goes to hossaviour, for the amazing support and beta work!
> 
> Accompanying fanmix and amazing art by [branquignole](http://branquignole.livejournal.com/) can be found [here](http://branquignole.livejournal.com/55417.html).
> 
> Brilliant artwork by [laenix](http://laenix.livejournal.com/) can be found [here](http://laenix.livejournal.com/2784.html) (warning for story spoilers!)

Disappearing on stage is simple. It can be done with mirrors. It can be done with body doubles. It can be done with well-timed drops through chutes and a sprint beneath the stage, one final, steady breath — in, out; c’mon, smile — before stepping into a throng of people. 

Ta-da.

Disappearing in real life is a little more involved. Especially if your name is known. Especially if you were the guy who screwed over his best friend and came out on top. Especially because of the internet, of Facebook; of the irreversible fact that _it’s all written in ink, Mark_.

Eduardo disappears first. He renounces his US citizenship and leaves.

When it happens, Mark doesn’t notice. It skirts his awareness, flickers on the edge of his thoughts as he concentrates on Facebook. So it’s a surprise when Mark finally sees (because the closer you look), when the glimpse of Eduardo’s name on the news one day tells Mark that he’s gone (disappeared); that no matter how hard Mark tries now, the show’s over, curtain’s closed.

Mark doesn’t try, and the fact that Eduardo’s gone (disappeared) sits with him, grows roots and digs deep.

  
_Ladies and gentlemen—_

_For our final act tonight—_

_We will make a man—_

disappear.

(Because he can always do one better. Does that adequately answer your condescending question?)

*

The call comes at 2:55 AM. Eduardo doesn’t wake, and the shrill sound of his cell blends into his dream, weaving itself into the narrative.

He’s home in Miami, steeped in the cool humidity of dusk. His mother’s making dinner at the stove and steam billows from the various pots, bringing with it the mellow, sweet-savory smell of peanuts and shrimp. It’s celebratory, because he’s just received his acceptance from Harvard. The letter has been set on the kitchen table with the folds soothed out, and it’s designed to be the first thing his father sees when he walks into the room. Eduardo can’t stop looking at it, attention drawn to the papers, and he grins every time he does.

 _Eduardo_ , his mother says as she bends to peer through the thick glass of the oven, at the silhouettes of _pao de Queijo_ set neatly inside. Eduardo can almost taste the cube of cheese tucked into the pillows of bread, and how it melts across his tongue. _Call your father. He should be here by now_.

Eduardo says okay, which is fine because he’s already holding the phone. A clunky, wide handset with big, plastic buttons. It starts to ring.

And ring.

And ring—

Eduardo jerks awake and it takes a moment to realize that the phone is still ringing. Not phone — his cell. He scrambles across the bed, gets knotted in the sheets and grabs it just as it stops. Eduardo squints at the number in the dark, angling the screen to read. He doesn’t recognize it offhand, but he is familiar with the sequence of digits. He hesitates.

The bright chirp of an incoming message startles him, and Eduardo spares a glance to the missed call notification before he hits call and presses the phone to his ear.

Dustin picks up halfway through the first ring and says, “Hey.”

“Hey,” Eduardo says. It comes out rough and he clears his throat. “Hey, Dustin,” Eduardo says, “you know it’s three in the morning here.”

“Shit,” Dustin says, “yeah, sorry. Chris said that it might be late or early or whatever. I didn’t check, sorry, man—”

The grudge against Dustin had dissolved along with whatever he had felt for Mark, and the annoyance Eduardo feels rests purely on the fact that his alarm goes off in less than four hours. 

Eduardo asks, “What’s up?”

“It’s Mark.”

Eduardo straightens and his fingers tighten on the body of his cell. He forces himself to relax, concentrates on the feel of his shoulders loosening because Mark is no big deal these days. 

“Mark?—”

“Yeah, he’s— he’s disappeared. Wardo, he’s gone.”

Eduardo’s slow from sleep, part of his head still in Miami with his acceptance letter and it’s when Dustin starts asking if Mark’s there that he catches up.

“Is he with me?” Eduardo repeats, incredulous as he kicks off the sheets and scrambles off the bed. He fumbles for the light switch and winces when the room is suddenly drenched in gold. “Dustin. We’re— we’re—” not friends? Enemies? Over? “Jesus, no, he’s not with me. Why would he be with me?”

Panic climbs in Dustin’s voice the same way it does when he’s excited. “I don’t know! I thought maybe you guys might have gotten over everything a—”

“So he’s gone,” Eduardo says.

“He’s not here,” Dustin is saying. “He’s not there.”

“How long has he been gone for?”

Dustin starts to speak, but then stops and something jumps in Eduardo’s chest at the pause. He curls against himself, brings a hand up to tuck against his mouth.

“Two? Three days? Or something,” Dustin says, “I mean, it’s not out of the ordinary for him to not bother coming in. He used to sleep on the couch in the office until we set up a remote connection at his place, but you remember we had those meetings coming up, right?—”

Eduardo remembers the invitations. One copy that had come through the mail and a copy online; both with a date, the time and the place. The first had gone straight to the garbage and the second he had ticked ‘not attending’.

“Mark’s always complaining about them,” Dustin’s saying, “but he’s always there. He never misses one, Wardo, not one.” And stops.

“Okay,” Eduardo says, filling the pause of Dustin’s silence.

Dustin continues, “These things are important, you know, about how the company looks—”

As if Eduardo could forget all the arguments about the party ending at 12 and the marlin and the trout—

“So it’s weird that he’s not even there for his own thing, right? So we call him. We leave a couple of messages. I stop by his place, because I’m the very best friend a guy could have and sometimes Mark forgets to sleep.”

Eduardo doesn’t say anything about how much of a good friend Dustin is and prompts him to continue—

“No one’s there. Computer’s on. Car’s there. His fish are still alive—”

“Mark’s got fish?”

“Yeah, we set up some tropical aquarium thing ages ago, me and Chris, so he remembers to eat. Feed them, feed himself— they’re still alive, so it can’t be that long since he’s left and maybe he’s,” another pause, and Eduardo imagines Dustin gesturing with his free hand. “AWOL. Only that was half a week ago and we’ve heard nothing. We can’t contact him. He’s not contacting us. Mark’s just— he’s just—”

“Disappeared?”

“Yeah,” Dustin’s defeat carries across the line. “We’ve filed a missing persons report and it’s been broadcasting over here. Has anybody contacted you? Like the police? Have you had any ransom notes?”

The question startles a laugh from Eduardo, high-pitched and sharp, before he manages to tamp it down.

“No,” Eduardo says, “no, I haven’t. You’re the first person to let me know. You—” Eduardo cuts himself off. “Can you— I might come over,” he says and he casts a glance around the room, at his clothes hung neatly over the back of his chair and at his desk with piles of paperwork. 

“You want to stay at mine?”

“Yeah, okay,” Eduardo says as he thinks about a visa and how long he’ll stay. “I’ll email you my flight details once I have them.”

“Okay,” Dustin says, “okay. I’ll call if anything turns up.” He sounds reassured, as if Eduardo coming back will make Mark appear from the ether. He says goodbye and hangs up.

Eduardo keeps his cell against his ear and listens to the silence. The thought comes whole from his confusion, the idea that this is something that Mark had organized. To have Eduardo turn up at Facebook HQ and Mark will be in his chair, staring at him from the glass box at the very center, coming out from being wired in. 

_Oh, hey, Wardo_ , Mark would say, _what brings you here_?

The image disappears (like Mark) and Eduardo shakes his head, because who does that (Mark). 

He tosses his cell aside, then pauses to take stock of the situation, hoping to find the seam of a dream. The facts remain the same: that Dustin has called at 3 in the morning to tell him that Mark has an aquarium and that he’s gone.

Gone.

How can he even apply that to Mark, because Mark doesn’t just go — he’s either there or he isn’t. The places he goes to are in his head or online because _physically_ , Mark doesn’t go anywhere (except maybe to Palo Alto, Eduardo thinks, before he can help it).

Eduardo exhales and the sound carries in the silence of the room. It doesn’t take him long to pack and he’s on the first flight to California before the morning’s even done.

*

Eduardo keeps the articles that chronicle Mark’s disappearance. He buys the papers they’re in and folds them away after reading them. He learns the different ways the government can track a person; the tabs that are kept on Mark’s bank account and on his passport. No holds are barred to find the CEO of Facebook.

Dustin asks one night, cross-legged on the floor with a bowl of pasta in his lap while they discuss the contingency plans Facebook have pulled out, “Would you ever work for Facebook again?”

Eduardo doesn’t consider it for a second and says, “No.”

His account is primarily for show. He logs in two or three times a month, and he acknowledges things like Dustin’s birthday and Chris’s birthday and the date of Facebook’s conception. That’s it.

Eduardo leaves for Singapore after his part of the investigation is done, once he’s turned down enough interviews for the press to get the hint. Once he’s answered all the, _where were you on the night of_ , and, _can you describe your last interaction with Mr. Zuckerberg_?

(He’s even asked about deep web, though the line of questions run short when it’s obvious Eduardo has never even heard of it. Dustin can’t stop laughing when Eduardo tells him, and Eduardo experiences a delayed annoyance when he discovers that the questions were creeping around things like _kidnapping_ and _hit men_.)

Fact is, Eduardo has his own commitments, and his life stopped revolving around Mark years ago.

Dustin drops him off at the San Francisco airport just as it starts to rain, and it mists in the humid air and steams on the tarmac as Dustin drives off. Eduardo watches the sleek shape of Dustin’s silver Prius merge into the traffic before he joins the flux of people through the airport doors.

The seat beside him holds the heavy bulk of a businessman and his elbow encroaches Eduardo’s personal space, the softened jut short of brushing Eduardo’s arm with every labored exhale. Eduardo wishes he had the foresight to take something that would let him sleep for the flight, and he ends up wide awake for all eighteen hours of it.

*

Mark liked to watch movies and it wasn’t unusual for him to have one playing the background while he coded. Eduardo could never understand how he worked like that. Even music was too distracting to study with for Eduardo, thoughts following the beat instead of the page in front of him.

There was a movie Mark had playing one night, while Eduardo had dozed on Mark’s bunk while he coded. Eduardo can’t recall the name, but he does remember the hazy, dream like feel and the saturated darkness against pops of neon. 

The main character had been missing sleep and over time, had started to see hallucinations. The movie had been clever about it, too, letting the viewer catch the static flicker of a man every so often before he stepped out of the dream and into the protagonist’s reality.

It’s the first thing that comes to mind when Eduardo starts catching snatches of Mark.

Like the movie, Mark appears on the very corner of Eduardo’s attention, only to disappear when he turns his head. He even stops one night, TV loud in the background, and calls out, “Mark?” —and then waits, half afraid and half expectant that Mark will step out of the shadows.

(our final act tonight—)

And then he does.

(we will make a man—)

*

The day he does is shit for Eduardo.

One of his business deals had fallen through, something that he had been so carefully negotiating for the past month. It happens before ten in the morning, and Eduardo’s so put out that he’s tempted to call it a day and go home. He doesn’t, and he sits through the meetings that follow in the aftermath, and then the ones after that, and then catches up with the accumulated work of the morning.

He pops a couple of painkillers for the ice-pick headaches he gets when he’s stressed. The ones that come in second intervals, and force him to breathe through the flare of pain and momentary loss of vision. He’s not sure if they’re useful for those sorts of headaches and there’s probably something wrong in his head, and Eduardo is bitter enough to think, _good_.

He gets home late, skips dinner and crashes on the lounge. His head swims with the residue of the day’s meetings — short play-by-plays that he thinks he could have handled better and half-formed ideas to sort out the mess.

Eduardo presses the heels of his hands against the socket of his eyes and concentrates on the dizzying blaze of stars. He falls asleep and wakes up a couple of hours later still on the couch, only now there’s an ache in his neck to match the dull pain in his head. 

Eduardo drags himself up, rests his head in his hands for a second before moving. He’s hungry and it’s late, and he turns the TV on as he heads to the kitchen only to stop, because—

it's Mark.

Eduardo catches a hand on the wall. He doesn’t know what to do, because Mark is on TV and how come no one told him that he was back? How come—

Mark smiles on screen, so bright and sudden that Eduardo flinches and looks away. Heat creeps up his neck as his heart skips, one, two, and then hammers against his ribs. Eduardo feels hot and cold at once, because it’s not Mark.

But—

Eduardo clenches his hands, concentrates on the bite of his nails on his palm. It’s not Mark. 

It’s been nearly two years, investigation still ongoing. Dustin keeps him up to date, has told him that nothing has turned up yet. That no evidence of foul play has been found. No demand for money. No emails, Facebook updates; or texts or phone calls.

Mark hates interviews. Eduardo remembers the dispositions, at how Mark had initially regarded the recording devices. How he had bunched his shoulders and ducked his head, a glimmer of uncertainty (Eduardo also remembers feeling smug about it, confident in his capability to perform in front of a camera), until he employs the best offense he has: he ignores them. Shuts them out, and, god, Eduardo knew how that felt, too.

Eduardo feels scattered as he sinks to the floor, back to the wall as the stares at the TV screen. He takes a steady breath in an effort to calm and rides out the last of the fight or flight.

The man who isn’t Mark stands at the center of a stage, flanked by a woman with thick red hair.

Not-Mark says, “Now, my lovely assistant, if you wouldn’t mind stepping into the crate,” and he helps her, supports the weight as she squeezes into a box, all smiles.

The lovely assistant has her hands poked through two circles of the box, hip height and chest height, and Not-Mark asks her to wiggle her fingers. The stage-lights catch the glitter on Lovely-Assistant’s nails as she waves her hands the best she can. 

Not-Mark circles around the crate once and then rests his weight against it before he shoves out the middle section with little fanfare and separates her.

It’s an old, old magic trick and even Eduardo knows that Lovely-Assistant stands with her back against the side of the box, her body twisted inside so it looks as if she’s facing forward. 

It’s their combined presence that makes it interesting, Not-Mark’s casual arrogance and how Lovely-Assistant plays off it, flirty and sarcastic at once. Like she’s rolling her eyes at him, but the fact is: they’re hooking up as soon as the curtain closes. If they can hold out that long.

Eduardo watches, rapt, as they go through their routine. A lot of it are old tricks, dressed up and presented at new, framed by Not-Mark and Lovely-Assistant (whose name is Henley, Eduardo learns, as Not-Mark casually asks her to, _please stand here while I_ —).

The saw comes out, and Henley allows herself to be levitated at one point; there are rabbits and more than one deck of cards, but the real show is the man who isn’t Mark.

Eduardo watches as he strides across the stage, shoulders broad in his suit as he moves with striking confidence. He has Mark’s face. He has his mouth and the sharp angle of his nose, the curls have been wrestled down, but they flick up at the ends.

…But Mark shuffles with his hands lost in the pockets of his hoodie, his thoughts and attention focused on threads of numbers and letters and how he can arrange them.

Mark isn’t, and this Eduardo thinks meanly, Mark isn’t socially capable. He doesn’t have the capacity to get up on stage and perform magic tricks with an assistant who is that stunning.

Eduardo feels lightheaded with the hilarity of Mark performing _magic tricks_ and he can’t even imagine it because it’s that absurd. He seals a hand over his mouth to stop the laughter, but it escapes anyway. Escapes as easily as Henley did from the handcuffs Mark ( _Mark_ ) had closed around her slim wrists.

It stops being funny when Mark takes center stage. He smiles at the camera in a way that makes heat gather in Eduardo’s eyes. “Mark, I—”

“Ladies and gentlemen—” Mark says, “for our final act tonight—”

Eduardo scrambles to his feet.

“We will make a man—”

And by the time he reaches the TV,

“Disappear.”

Mark is gone.

*

Eduardo stares at the screen long after the program finishes, and it’s only when the late night bulletin starts that he moves.

He gathers to stand, slow and careful, as if something in him will break if he goes too fast. He feels raw and worn out and he misses the beginning of the day, where all he had to deal with was a business venture that had soured.

Eduardo wipes his eyes with his fingers, feels the dampness of his tears and then laughs. The sound is as sore as he feels and he stops. 

The newscaster is a woman with short, black hair and she talks about the day’s headlines. There’s nothing about Mark Zuckerberg surfacing as a stage magician and Eduardo has to tamp down another laugh.

It’s almost three in the morning and Eduardo considers calling Dustin.

He lets the scenario play out in his head: “Hey,” he will say after Dustin greets him. Dustin’s busy these days with Facebook’s extra duties, so his voice sounds worn at the edges.

Eduardo will ask, “Have you watched any magic shows lately?” Dustin will say no, he hasn’t, and so Eduardo tells him that he caught one on TV that night and he’s about 85% sure that Mark was in it.

In his head, Dustin pauses and asks him to repeat himself. Dustin’s tired, so he sounds more confused than excited, and Eduardo says, _I said that I caught Mark on TV and that he had an assistant with red hair and glittery nails and he cut her in half with a saw_. Pause. _And a rabbit escaped before he could put it on the box and he had to chase it across the stage_.

Eduardo lets the scenario trail off and it finishes with Dustin asking if he’s all right.

It’s three in the morning and Eduardo’s wired like he’s popped a caffeine pill and chased it down with a double shot of espresso. He hasn’t felt this sort of jittery nervousness since Harvard.

He moves to his office, a little alcove set into the wall where his laptop sits. He boots it up and turns on the modem, watching as the status lights flicker from red to a crisp, bright green as it connects to the network. He doesn’t sit in the chair, just shoves it aside as he bends to type, J DANIEL ATLAS, into the search bar.

The top result is jdanielatlas.com and Eduardo clicks. The site it leads to is elegance in black, and if J Daniel Atlas set it up himself, it’s just another difference between him and Mark.

Eduardo clicks on the biography tag.

It’s a short and curt description that doesn’t give up much information outside of how Daniel became interested in magic (card tricks from his uncle, and then discovering Houdini), but what Eduardo’s most interested in is the profile picture.

The photo is in black and white, taken from above to play up the angles of Daniel’s face. 

Eduardo has admitted to himself many, many times that Mark has an attractive face. And, even now, years later, what Eduardo recalls best is the intensity of Mark’s eyes (and, god, he could remember _wishing_ Mark would just _look at him_ sometimes.)

The monochrome erases the color of Mark’s eyes, but it doesn’t hide the intensity and Eduardo holds the picture’s gaze until he has to look away.

He navigates the site for a little longer, tries the inbuilt card game that he’s certain Mark could write the script for in half an hour before clicking to the SHOW LIST page.

Disappointment overwhelms him when Eduardo reads that most of the dates are a year old, like his chance to find Mark is stolen from him before he could really do anything.

He scrolls down the page, following the track of Daniel’s acts backwards through the United States. There’s a small cluster that take place around San Francisco, before following the underbelly of the US and finishing in New York City.

He scrolls back to the top of the page and is about to navigate away when something catches his eye.

THE FOUR HORSEMEN is set just below the SHOW LIST banner. It’s not underlined so Eduardo doesn’t notice it’s a link until he hovers his cursor over it. He clicks and it takes him to another home page.

It’s black, like Daniel’s site, and the background has a faint repeated image of a Fleur-de-lis. A logo sits at the center of the page, and the best Eduardo can make of it is that it’s a stylized skeleton key. Beneath it sits a date stamp and under that is an address. Excitement thrills through Eduardo when he realizes that it’s a show, and his hand shakes as he roves his cursor around the screen for any other hidden links.

There aren’t any, but he’s not disappointed. He straightens, back aching.

He’s hungry and tired, and strung out by the day and worn down from the hours spent swinging from emotional extremes. He hasn’t felt like this since the dispositions, since realizing that he had been written out of Facebook. That Mark _didn’t_ care. Eduardo hits the back button until he’s on Daniel’s profile page. He stares at the picture, at the familiar lines of Mark’s face.

“You’ve disappeared,” he tells it. “But you’re not gone, haven’t you? You won’t even let me—” 

Everything scatters and again, Eduardo gathers everything together. He turns off the laptop. He moves to his bedroom and finally changes out of his work clothes before he slides into bed.

Eduardo falls asleep just as the sun crests over the horizon and doesn’t wake until noon.

*

Eduardo organizes the flight. The show takes place in one of the glitzy hotels, and he books a room there, too, after securing a ticket. He opts for a seat from above to look down, aiming for best vantage possible without being caught up in the crowd around the stage, which offers only standing room.

The show is a fortnight away and Eduardo keeps busy. He clocks overtime to take his mind off Mark and off Daniel; he closes deals and manages other projects. He keeps an eye on the rise and fall of the stock market and works on his Cantonese. He takes clients out for dinners and is out until early morning, loose and buzzed from liquor; the taste of it thick on his tongue and fingers tacky from foam and sugar.

Eduardo has never worked this efficiently, has never been able to run himself this hard and have it feel like it isn’t affecting him.

He does all it but still, it’s the slowest two weeks he’s ever lived through. Each day feels like a week, and the span of the week feels like a month, little wonder he has so much time.

Eduardo had entertained the idea of contacting Dustin, at least let him know that he was visiting (it sounds so casual, _visiting_ , because what he’s really doing is _finding Mark_ ), but he doesn’t do it until the very last moment, on the night before the flight. He can’t sleep, keyed up and nerves jangled, and so he digs into his phone history and finds Dustin’s number.

Dustin picks up immediately. “Hey!” he says, his standard greeting. “Any reason why you’re up at three am, Singapore time?”

“I’m booked to fly out tomorrow,” Eduardo says, “for LA.”

Dustin sounds horrified as he says, “L _A_? Wardo, why didn’t you _tell me_.”

“It was very last minute,” Eduardo says over Dustin’s theatrics.

Dustin asks if he’s headed over for a business meeting or a conference, but Eduardo misses the question and asks, “Are you busy on the 12th?”

“— but they didn’t have any, so I—,” Dustin stops and regains his bearings, “the 12th? Like, day after tomorrow?”

“Yeah.”

“No? I don’t think so? Why? Tell your best friend forever what’s up.”

“I’m booked to see a show.”

“And you want me as your date?”

“…If by ‘date’, you mean, ‘company.’”

The sound of a keyboard is clear across the line, surprisingly sharp for the distance.

“Just checking my schedule and—” A stab of a key, and Eduardo knows before Dustin says anything that he’s cleared the 12th’s column of events.

“Don’t cancel—”

“It’s fine,” Dustin says, “it’s nothing an intern can’t take care of. So anyway,” he says, and Eduardo can see Dustin sitting back in his chair, phone jammed to his ear while his other hand guides his mouse all over the desk. “What’s this show about and is there stripping involved? I’m honored that you invited me by the way.”

Eduardo says, semi-confident that Dustin won’t look into it further as long as he gets the general idea, “It’s a magic show.”

“Magic?” Dustin says, “Wardo, I never even knew! I can do magic,” he says, “here. Think of a number.”

7 springs to mind, after 19,000.

“Okay, uh,— think of the alphabet, you got that?”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says.

“Okay, now count backwards from the end of the alphabet.”

Eduardo takes a second to process the request and then says, “I might head to bed. Try to catch a couple of hours before the flight.”

“Yeah, okay,” Dustin doesn’t miss a beat. “Call me when you’re Stateside? Where’re you staying at again?”

Eduardo tells him and then they take a moment to organize the logistics. It ends with Dustin booking a room at the hotel and a ticket for the show, ready to meet Eduardo by the time Eduardo checks in.

Dustin says, before he hangs up, “Wardo? Your number — it was 19, wasn’t it?”

Eduardo hesitates and then says, “Close.”

*

The show takes place in the wide underbelly of the hotel, past the lobby full of ringing slot machines, where rows of men and women dedicate countless hours into feeding them with coins. They’re escorted to their seats a level up from the ground stage: section E, row 4, seats 9 and ten respectively.

Eduardo looks over to the stage. From his vantage, it looks a little like the icon weather forecasters use to indicate a cyclone: a thick, black circle with thinner arms sweeping out at each side. Everything is edged with a ribbon of LED cable, with the thickest band laid into the middle, circling center stage, where it cycles through a spectrum of color.

The design looks as if its been aimed towards the elegance of a grand piano, but the stadium lighting, the underlying sweet-sour tang of alcohol (and the sticky residue underfoot); the wide plasma screens bolted at opposite sides of the circular room tarnishes whatever the architect hopes to achieve.

Bottom line: it’s tacky.

Eduardo tries to place Mark as he knows him in the thick of it, hunched in the stiff, black seat beside him and asking why the hell they’re here. He can almost feel the agitation that radiates off his imaginary Mark, who has been denied his cell and laptop in order to be seated, and now has nothing to do with his hands, which are clenched tight in his lap much like Eduardo’s.

It’s a packed house. Dustin’s engaged with the person sitting next to him, and Eduardo listens as she tells Dustin that she’s, like, in _love_ , with Daniel Atlas. She catches all his shows — stage _and_ street ones, like it’s important to clarify — whenever he’s in the West Coast, and Dustin says, ‘Yeah, me, too!’ She asks Dustin what’s his favorite trick, but Dustin’s response is lost as the lights darken and the crowd loses it.

Eduardo straightens, palms suddenly sweaty as his heart jack-rabbits in his chest.

Eduardo — if asked later — won’t even be able to recall the first magician (if there even had been); not once J Daniel Atlas is announced — and Eduardo whips his head to Dustin so fast he’s sure he’s broken his neck.

He expects Dustin to be staring, slack-jawed, at the stage. He expects Dustin to grab him and say, _Shit, Wardo, it’s Mark_ (and he’s ready to say, _yes, I know_ and, _this is why I’m here_.)

But Dustin’s cheering with the rest of the crowd and Eduardo’s the one staring as Dustin pinches both index fingers between the tight line of his lips to whistle, the sound slicing through the excited screams with the exact precision of a scalpel.

“Dustin—” Eduardo says, but his voice is lost beneath the announcement of _Henley Reeves_ and _Jack Wilder_ , and the jump in volume each name invokes. It’s worse than any of the clubs he’s been to — ears ringing and body thumping with the bass line, volume jacked up way too loud for a stock standard magic show (save for the part where J Daniel Atlas is Mark E Zuckerberg).

Eduardo misses every trick. He can’t concentrate on the show when it feels like he’s stepped into some alternate universe where Mark never existed and there’s only ever been J Daniel Atlas (Mark’s wearing a tux, the thought bursts into Eduardo’s head like a firework. A tux with black satin lapels).

Dustin doesn’t recognize Mark. No one recognizes him. No one in the crowd stands up and says, _isn’t that Mark Zuckerberg? The CEO of Facebook? Youngest billionaire in the world?_

Eduardo wants to laugh and he wants to cry, and in the crowd with Dustin by his side, he feels battered and alone.

He pulls himself together — in, out; steady (c’mon, smile) — and focuses on the stage.

He watches Daniel, who leads with casual confidence. He plays the audience and jokes with his co-hosts. There isn’t any exclusivity in tonight’s show; they’re all invited.

Eduardo recognizes Henley from TV; her red hair like licks of flame across her shoulders. Live and on-stage, nothing simmers between her and Daniel and the thought placates Eduardo more than he’s willing to admit.

The older man, face weathered and shadowed at times beneath his fedora, Eduardo doesn’t know. He recalls his face from the introduction, but draws a blank when it comes to a name.

But he doesn’t matter because it’s Jack Wilder makes Eduardo nervous and it’s not as if Daniel favors Jack over the others, but—

Eduardo sees a measure of affection in the way Jack regards Daniel. It makes him think of long nights spent staring at the lazy slope of Mark’s shoulders, the light of the computer screen diffused through Mark’s curls to create a corona of gold around his head. It hurts, because Daniel catches every single one of the looks Jack sends him, and grins in return.

Eduardo stands and then he trips and stumbles, distractedly apologizing as he works his way out of the row and into the open aisle. He hears Henley announce their final act for the night and tries not to run as he leaves the room.

*

Singapore sleeps late, but Las Vegas never sleeps.

Eduardo stands in a neon cascade of light. It flashes across his eyes and mottles on his exposed skin. The sidewalk is flush with people, and they knock into him as they pass; an elbow, a purse, a turn of the head — sometimes curious, sometimes annoyed, before they turn back to their companions. The sound of conversation, the stop-start of cars; the screams and shouts and catcalls compound in Eduardo’s head.

He somehow makes it back to his hotel room and crumples on the bed. His face is half pressed into the thick duvet, material coarse against his cheek. He breathes the different notes of perfume leeched into the fibers; the deodorant from cleaners, and the earthy-dank smell of excessive use and little maintenance.

Eduardo lays there until Dustin knocks on his door — a rapid drumming of knuckles — and he drags himself off the bed to answer.

Dustin’s high from the show and he shoves a couple of papers at Eduardo. 

“Here, check this out,” Dustin says. 

He continues as Eduardo belatedly accepts the papers and says, “Why’d you walk out, dude? You missed like the best part.”

Dustin shoves past to pace the short length of the room. It’s ten feet at most, and he gets to the chairs that sit by the tall windows overlooking neon streets before he’s forced to turn.

Eduardo thinks of the story of Peter Pan, and how fairies are only capable of experiencing one emotion at the time due to their size. Dustin’s basically vibrating in his excitement, movements fast and clipped. It’s an easy comparison to make.

Eduardo smiles, bemused, before he studies the strips of paper in his hands. The smile withers. 

“Dustin,” he says as he looks back up. “Why do you have euro?”

It’s the right question because Dustin has a contained mini-explosion in lieu of an immediate answer.

“They robbed a bank in Paris,” he says, words a jumble that Eduardo has to pick apart. “They fucking robbed a bank in Paris.” 

Another euro materializes from Dustin’s pocket and he holds it up to the light then flicks the paper the way bank tellers do when they’re counting cash.

“Where did you find these guys?” Dustin’s asking as he folds and tucks the note back into his pocket with reverent care.

It’s late, Eduardo’s head hurts, reeling from the jump across the dateline, and he’s supposedly holding a handful of notes fresh from a Parisian bank. 

He forgets about being coy and says, “Dustin. That was Mark.”

Dustin’s excitement evaporates and he says, after a second, “What?”

“Daniel Atlas,” Eduardo feels his resolve crumble at the look Dustin gives him, and he alters his argument without noticing he does it. “Don’t you think he looks like Mark?”

Dustin scrunches up his face. A minute passes, and the fold in Dustin’s brow deepens as he visibly chases a recollection of Daniel Atlas. 

“Maybe?”

Eduardo hands back the money and grabs his laptop that he has left charging on the desk set opposite the bed. He pulls up jdanielatlas.com and opens the biography page. 

J Daniel Atlas stares at them in black and white and Eduardo turns his head to Dustin and repeats: “Don’t you think he looks like Mark?”

Dustin frowns as he reaches out to adjust the screen. The answer is uncomfortable, when he finally gives it, “A little.”

Eduardo looks to the screen and then back to Dustin, incredulous. “A little? It— it’s Mark. Dustin, that’s Mark. J Daniel Atlas is Mark.”

“Mark has curly hair,” Dustin points out and Eduardo can’t believe what he’s hearing.

He turns the laptop towards him, hits open a new tab and brings up a slew of pictures that contain Daniel Atlas. Most of them are shots taken by fans from his street shows, featuring blurry snatches of Daniel’s face. 

There are more than a few promotional shots though, several thousand pixel by thousand pixel of Daniel Atlas with his hands in the pockets of his jeans, posture relaxed as he meets the gaze of the camera head on. There are even a couple with his hair curly.

The fact that it’s Mark is unmistakable, but Dustin stares at the screen as if he’s got no clue what he’s looking at and something cold sluices through Eduardo’s body.

Eduardo says, “Nevermind,” as he pulls the laptop back towards him and shuts it down while Dustin remains silent at his side; the friend that Mark didn’t screw over.

Dustin doesn’t get angry — Eduardo’s not sure he’s even capable of it — but his voice is tight when he says, “Look I miss Mark, too—”

Eduardo almost corrects him, but doesn’t, and he clenches his jaw as Dustin continues, “And I can see what you mean about Daniel looking like Mark. But that’s not him, okay?” The anger dissolves into pity, like it’s occurred to Dustin, the possibility that Eduardo is still tender over Mark’s disappearance.

Eduardo wants to laugh, but can’t in the face of Dustin’s sad eyes. “Sorry,” he says instead.

Dustin hugs him, arm tight across Eduardo’s shoulders and Eduardo finds comfort in the mellow scent of cologne and soap before Dustin pulls away.

“I think I’m still jet lagged,” Eduardo says.

“Yeah,” Dustin agrees, “Don’t worry about getting up early in the morning. Just text me when you’re good to go.”

Eduardo subjects himself to Dustin’s mothering, turns down the offer to get room service and promises to contact him if he feels (and here Dustin pauses) _overwhelmed_.

Eduardo pinky-swears to everything and keeps a smile plastered on his face until the door closes after Dustin. The silence settles, rings in his ears, and Eduardo straightens. 

A phone sits on the small table, next to his laptop and after a slight hesitation, Eduardo strides across the room and picks up the handle. He holds it for a moment, long enough to hear the dial tone win over the constant hum of street noise.

Eduardo stabs ‘0’ and the response is an immediate, “Hello, you’ve reached front desk.”

The woman says it with such cheer that it’s a parody of itself; no one is that happy to be working reception at nearly one in the morning.

“Hi,” Eduardo says. “I was hoping you could connect me to,” he hesitates, “uh, Daniel Atlas’s suite?”

The tap of acrylic nails comes over the line for a moment before the reception tells him, “Sorry, there is no one here by that name.”

“What about Mark Zuckerberg?” Eduardo tries, desperate.

The pause is slightly longer. 

“Sorry,” reception says, “we have no one here by that name.”

She didn’t even check, but Eduardo doesn’t say anything more than, ‘thank you,’ and, ‘have a good night,’ before he hangs up.

He stares at the phone set for a moment, at the curls of the cord and the heavy handle, before he crosses the room again and heads out.

At Harvard, Mark could be relied upon to be in one or two places: his dorm, or in the computer lab closest to it. Mark would stray, but not without reason and usually within a radius.

The thought holds long enough for Eduardo to realize how ridiculous it is, and he’s about to head back into his room before he starts knocking on the doors of the hotel when the lift he had called chimes and starts to open. A muscle in Eduardo’s jaw twitches as his headache rears to the forefront of his mind. He steps in and hits ‘G’.

Eduardo returns to the hotel twenty minutes later with a plastic bag slung over his wrist. The thin handles cut into his skin and he pauses to adjust before he raises his head in time to see Mark looking at him from across the lobby. 

Mark’s expression remains even as Eduardo stares, and it’s only when the lift doors start to pull shut does time jolt back into motion.

Eduardo heart thuds hard against his ribs and in his ears, and he reaches out despite the distance, says, “Wait—” as he drags his body from where it has stuck in the middle of the hotel floor, legs heavy like he’s sloughing through mud.

He hits the doors as it shuts and bangs his fist on it before he reaches across to slap the ‘up’ button. He’s getting looks from reception, and he would be embarrassed if not for the fact Mark has just _disappeared before his eyes_.

The doors don’t open and Eduardo says, “Fuck!” and hits the panels again. Pain flares in his hand and vibrates up his arm as front desk calls out, “Sir—”

Eduardo whips around, finger pointed to the lift behind him. “What floor is he on?” he demands.

He’s done this before, felt this sort of anger and confusion flood his body and it catches up with Eduardo a second later, hears his voice and feels the way his body burns: _how much have his shares been diluted? How much has yours?_

“What. Floor,” Eduardo says, enunciates clearly. “Is he on.”

“Sir,” firm this time, “I’m not authorized to give you that information.”

It’s said in a way that suggests, ‘sir, I’m going to have to ask you to leave the building if you continue to make a scene’, and potentially, ‘sir, this is security,’ and Eduardo turns back to the closed lift doors with his hands in tight fists by his side and the handles of the bag digging into his skin again.

He bites his lip as he waits, body thrumming and neck and shoulders seizing with the sheer amount of tension coursing through him.

The chime above his head signals the lift’s arrival, and hope shoots through Eduardo faster than he can clamp it down.

It’s empty — _of course it’s empty_ — and Eduardo’s light-headed as he steps into the cubicle.

He stares at the entrance of the hotel as it stretches out before him, cut at the edges where the open doors of the lift impede on the scenery. The hotel is sleek and modern, everything glossed and edged with light.

Eduardo digs up the memory of the first Facebook offices: the glass, the panels of screens; the graffitied wall and the clusters of work stations, and it makes him feel a little better to think that Mark still has shitty taste.

*

Eduardo wakes. He’s not in the middle of a dream when it happens, not caught between wake and sleep and drifting into lucidity. This time he’s yanked back into the current, disorientated as he tries to make sense of the knocking in his head over the frantic drumming against the hotel room door. Eduardo drags his body up and presses the heels of his hands against the socket of his eyes.

The mild flare of pain resets everything, and Eduardo moves off the bed and to the door. Dustin falls in as if he had been plastered on the other side. 

It takes him a second to recover and he grabs Eduardo by the arms, fingers tight, and says, “They robbed a bank! Shit, Wardo, they really robbed it.”

Dustin lets go and sweeps his hands through his hair as he barges into the room. He’s stopped again by the heavy chairs that overlook the street and he turns around. The curtains are open, save for the white voile where the morning light filters through. The light is not strong enough to halo, but it still throws Dustin into shadow as he stands in front of it.

Dustin fumbles out the euro he had folded away the previous night and it’s only then that what Dustin had said catches up to Eduardo and Eduardo freezes where he stands and says, faint, but still audible, “What the fuck?”

Dustin glances up to Eduardo when he says it — words slightly more rounded beneath the residual weight of an accent — because Eduardo doesn’t swear. He doesn’t. He’s one of those clever people in possession of vocabulary enough not to have to.

Dustin’s already talking: “I went down just a while go to check out the breakfast.”

“You went down for food?”

“For breakfast. I was hungry. You remember watching all those cop shows in the dorm? Back at Harvard? When they all kinda swarm in and there are guns everywhere and, I mean, who does that in a place like this? They come in, flash their cards at the desk, and then half of them run up the stairs while the other half wait at the elevators. Actually wait, Wardo, like they aren’t packing heat and I swear to God one of them had an RPG.”

(Eduardo discovers later that exactly none of them had an RPG, but Dustin maintains what he saw.)

“They come back down like, ten minutes later and The Horsemen are cuffed. Like,” and he gestures, “don’t drop the soap.”

“How did you know they robbed a bank?”

Dustin had told him that they had sent some French guy back to his vault in Paris and ‘they had sucked money into the ventilation tube right back into the audience’. That notes, crisp from the mint, had fluttered down into the audience’s outstretched hands.

Easy enough, Wardo had figured, the explanation sliding into place while Dustin had recounted the final act. Eduardo didn’t have to think hard about it: exchange for euro, cut the losses and bulk it up with slips of paper. Mark probably has enough money in the bank to lose a million or two and not even break a sweat.

That was all the thought Eduardo had put into it, because the only people who cared about the logistics of magic are the sort of people who think their big win will happen the next time they pull the lever on a pokie machine.

Eduardo gestures for one of the notes, and Dustin obliges, handing him a crisp 100. He turns the note over in his hand, notes the serial number and the faint impression of a watermark. 

Dustin copies, as if he hadn’t done the same thing last night. The difference now is that it’s stolen money.

“Am I an accomplice?” Dustin asks suddenly.

He looks up and Eduardo recognizes the expression on his face. Only there’s a distinction in the sheer amount of panic, because there is: I haven’t studied for this exam. And then there is: I went to a magic show last night and they robbed a bank and I’m holding proof of that.

“It’s okay,” Eduardo says, “no one’s going to arrest you. You’re not—” Eduardo looks at the euro again. “They’d have to arrest everybody who went last night.”

“Yeah?” Dustin says, “yeah? Yeah, okay, cool. So,” he continues, voice a little less shaky. “Can I keep this then?”

“You can’t use it. They’ll suspend everything with the serial number. Maybe have on the news a recall for those with any to submit them to the local PD or something.” Eduardo pauses, then says, “It’ll be pretty good souvenir though.”

Satisfied that no one is going to beat down his door and arrest him for having a couple hundred stolen euro, Dustin folds the notes back up and puts it away. He does it with the same loving care he as he did the previous night that Eduardo has to look away so he doesn’t laugh. He gives back the last hundred once he’s regained himself and Dustin packs it away with the others.

Dustin resumes his story, “I talked to the lady at the desk—”

Their check out time is ten. The plan is for Eduardo to stay a couple of days at Dustin’s before returning to Singapore, but the plan had also included Dustin recognizing Daniel for who he was and it hadn’t accounted for Mark actually robbing a bank.

“She said that they have definitely been arrested and taken in for questioning. She said that — and this I totally had to work for, and she made me promise not to tell anyone so please be better at that than I am — the bank of that French dude I was telling you about?”

“Yeah?”

“3 mil has gone. They robbed it. For real. They asked, ‘who has a bank we can rob?’ Boom. Did it.”

The fight leaves Dustin and he drops on the bed to processes what he had just said and Eduardo wonders, as he glances to Dustin’s stunned face, how he will grapple with the fact that Mark did it. That Mark robbed a bank and Eduardo doesn’t doubt he could do it.

The thought slots into place without prompting and it gives Eduardo a pause. He turns it over in his head. Would Mark rob a bank? He would hack into it because he could, he’s hacked into many places because he could. He’s stolen intellectual property, he’s violated privacy laws, security—

What is he doing, Eduardo wonders, what does Mark want to achieve that he hasn’t in finding Facebook.

Eduardo routinely packs as he thinks, starting with his laptop.

“Wait,” Dustin says as he springs off the bed. “Wait, stop.”

His hands skitter towards Eduardo’s laptop, but he doesn’t actually touch.

“Have you searched them recently?” Dustin asks as if last night didn’t happen.

As if Eduardo pulling up J Daniel Atlas’s site and demanding to know if he looked like Mark never occurred and Eduardo stares for a moment before he goes, “Yeah.”

Eduardo reboots the laptop. He never turned it off properly and he can feel Dustin wanting to tell him of for it along with the restraint he’s wielding because he doesn’t.

Eduardo pulls open the homepage for the Four Horsemen and adjusts the screen away from the glare as they bend toward it. It’s the same, for most part, the black background, the Fleur-de-Lis, and the stylized key as their logo. The only change is the date and location.

Dustin checks his phone and says, “That’s tomorrow.”

The location is French and it takes Eduardo a second put it together. “New Orleans?”

Dustin leaps onto the laptop and before Eduardo can be annoyed at him about it (Dustin’s the one who explained all those years ago about the rules for laptops. You might be interrupting a coding streak. You might accidentally delete something. You might learn that Mark’s secretly into sounding, followed by Mark’s look of disgust that had both him and Dustin laughing for ages), Dustin’s pulled up flight information and is looking at him with a degree of expectancy.

Eduardo doesn’t even think. “Okay.”

*

They turn up in New Orleans with two pieces of hand luggage and no accommodation.

“Shit,” Dustin says as he stares at the packed streets. He looks down quickly after, when he steps on something that breaks underfoot.

Eduardo follows his look down and sees that it’s a cord of beads. Dustin had broken the chain when he had stepped on it, spilling them everywhere.

“Shit,” Dustin says again. “I didn’t—”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eduardo says, because there are beads everywhere.

He steels his shoulders before he pushes his way through the crowd. He goes at an angle, making space between the men and women who ignore them. Their screams ring in Eduardo’s ears. He’s sweating, prickling across his skin and making his shirt stick. Something jostles his hand luggage and Eduardo tightens his grip on the handle and yanks it back.

They make it through the bulk of the crowd, Eduardo reaching the outskirts first before he turns to find Dustin. Dustin, usually the one who’s happy to throw himself into the thick of things, wedges his way out from between a pair of women looking harried. There’s lipstick smeared on his forehead and half his hair’s stuck up, like someone has run a hand through it more than once. His shirt has been rucked out of his pants and he almost trips over the curb.

Dustin swears, drops his bag and runs his hands over his body to check he’s in one piece as he says, “I never want to do that again.”

Eduardo pulls out his cell and makes a quick search for hotels. He knows that finding a place overnight on short notice is difficult enough without the added complication of the Mardi Gras and it’s proven when the first three places he calls tell him that they’re booked out. Eduardo’s certain that they’re laughing at him the moment he hangs up, the guy who’s trying to find a room during Mardi Gras week.

“Dustin,” Eduardo has to speak louder because of the sudden whoop of emergency sirens. “I don’t know if we’re going to find a place tonight.”

Eduardo checks his phone again and sees it’s nearly 10. Ticket sales for the Horsemen’s show go on sale at 10. Eduardo glances around the area, looking through the crowd for cafes or even a McDonald’s for free Wi-Fi. He could book on his cell, but he would really prefer doing it on his laptop—

Dustin grabs his arm, palm hot, and shoulders them through the flow of people heading up the street after the parade. The crowd thins to nothing once they’re far enough, but the sound of music and voices and the faint whine of a car siren is still audible despite the distance.

“Shit,” Dustin says again. He’s taken out his cell, something more slick and fancy than Eduardo’s and he’s flicking the screen with his fingers. “I could really do with a shower right about now, but that won’t even happen if we can’t find a place, right?”

Eduardo winces and pulls at his shirt to get it to unstuck from his back.

“Hey,” Dustin says, “could you book the tickets?”

Eduardo looks around once more and finds nowhere with free Wi-Fi for his laptop, so he pulls up the site on his cell. There’s a countdown on the ticket sales page, and it reads 01:29. Eduardo watches the numbers turn in a modern incarnation of the split-flap alarm clock that sat on his bedside table as he grew up.

The counter disappears once it hits 00:00 and fades into a link that reads, CLICK HERE TO PURCHASE. The ‘O’ and the ‘A’ is a spade and a heart respectively, and Eduardo clicks. 

It lags, whether by the amount of telecommunication traffic or the amount of people accessing the site, Eduardo doesn’t know. It takes a minute to load and by the time it does, there’s a notice that says, SOLD OUT.

“Dustin,” Eduardo says, “it’s sold out. The show’s sold out.”

Dustin says, “What?” and crowds into Eduardo’s space, grabbing his hand to tilt the screen out of the glare of the sun. “Jesus Christ,” he says. “It’s not even five minutes past 10 yet.”

“I watched it count down until ticket sales,” Eduardo says.

He stares at the screen and then refreshes. The notice reads: SOLD OUT. Disappointment crushes the air from Eduardo’s lungs and he swears, borrowing Dustin’s morning mantra as he refreshes the page again. 

SOLD OUT.

Dustin cell rings and he pulls away from Eduardo to answer it. Eduardo doesn’t even notice. He doesn’t notice the dampness of his shirt, or the way he sun beats down on his neck, uncharacteristically hot for early March. He’s overwhelmed by the desire to throw his cell, peg it against the concrete because he was so damn close.

Dustin’s voice cuts through Eduardo’s thoughts and he forces himself to listen, making the effort to calm because snapping at Dustin would gain little and Eduardo prides himself on control. He’s only ever lost it once.

Eduardo loosens his grip on his cell, until the white bloom of his fingers disappears and returns to a healthy pink.

“I got us a place,” Dustin’s saying. He speaks fast enough for his voice to fade beneath the parade that marches on a couple of streets ahead. “One of our interns has a cousin down this way and pulled a couple strings, so now I have to take her out for dinner once I get back— but I figure it’s no big deal because she’s cute.”

Eduardo’s weary when he says, “Dustin. You do know you can’t keep hitting on your interns, right? It’s not professional and— and they’re not getting paid.”

Dustin gives him a puzzled look and says simply, “I wasn’t hitting on her. It’s just dinner for a favor.”

Eduardo doesn’t have it in him to argue, largely disappointed in being stuck in New Orleans for a show that he can’t even get to, so he says, “Where’s the hotel?”

“Uh,” Dustin looks at his phone again. “Alicia’s forwarding the directions, hold on.”

Eduardo hoists the strap of his luggage over his shoulder. It cuts into his skin, painful despite the buffer of his shirt. It’ll rub something raw, but it keeps his mind off Mark and the Four Horsemen so Eduardo doesn’t adjust it.

“Okay,” Dustin says after a short while.

His head is still bent over his phone and the mid-morning light catches the color of his hair making Eduardo wonder why people had it in for redheads.

“Right,” Dustin says as he looks around to orientate himself. “It’s a bit of a hike, so—”

Eduardo wraps his hand on the luggage strap and tells him that it’s fine.

*

Dustin flings a shirt at him and says, “The night is young, it’s Mardi Gras and we’re going out. Chop chop!”

The room they’ve secured barely has space for the two beds it holds. Eduardo guesses that the second, pressed against the sliding door in a way that jams it, was a last minute addition. 

Eduardo’s sprawled on the one closest to the door, laptop by his hip where he had been catching up with work emails.

What he doesn’t tell Dustin is that he has the ticket page for the Four Horsemen up in another tab. One that he refreshes every so often in the hope of a final ticket sale, like some bands do at popular venues, but the SOLD OUT notice doesn’t change.

Dustin digs through his luggage and pulls out a shirt; a casual one that’s either several years old (Eduardo definitely remembers seeing it during Harvard), or one exceptionally similar. Dustin unbuttons the one he’s got on, shrugs out of it and pulls the other one over his head.

“C’mon,” Dustin says again. He slides his hands through his hair a couple of times and looks at the result in the mirror.

Eduardo pulls himself up on the bed and grabs the shirt that Dustin had thrown at him. It’s one of his — and Eduardo wonders when Dustin had gone through his luggage — the closest Eduardo packed to casual.

“I can go out in what I’m wearing,” Eduardo says as he changes.

“You’re not going out in a suit,” Dustin says as he wedges himself in the attaché bathroom.

The bathroom features a toilet and the smallest sink Eduardo has ever seen. He can dip his fingers in and that’s it, and the water comes in room temperature from either tap.

(The woman who’d checked them in, old and dark skinned with a thick accent, had informed them that the showers were communal on the first floor and that flip-flops were required. She had refused to release the keys until they had told her they understood.)

Eduardo hears the toilet flush and the rough grind of a tap turning. The water cuts — and Eduardo knows this because he can hear it in the pipes that run through the walls — a second later and Dustin squeezes out.

“You good to go?”

The neighborhood is quiet, hostel bracket by stern, silent houses — but the streets gather momentum as they approach the French Quarter, until it’s a lively blend of people and noise.

In any other circumstance, Eduardo would have enjoyed it. It reminds him of family parties growing up; all laughter and drinks and good food, and putting up with crushing hugs from relatives that he hadn’t seen since the last party where they tell him, _oh how you’ve grown, Edu. You look just like your father_ , then, Why aren’t you married yet?

They stop at a restaurant recommended by Alicia the intern, and share _étouffée_ and then _beignets_ dusted with an excess of powdered sugar. 

The sugar is tacky on Eduardo’s fingers, even after he sucks them clean, and Dustin laughs at how much Eduardo looks like he’s rolled in a pile of crack and Eduardo forgets about Mark and Daniel and about why he’s in New Orleans. It’s just him and Dustin, and they’re continuing their friendship from where it had been left off in the short in-between time before Facebook.

The crowd swells around 9PM and it’s then that Eduardo becomes aware of the time. He attempts subtlety, curving his wrist every so often to steal glances at his watch, but Dustin calls him out, says, “What, you gotta date or something?” with a grin, eyebrows raised.

“It’s four in morning in Singapore,” Eduardo says automatically.

A quick mental check tells him that he’s wildly off: it’s mid-morning in Singapore and right now he’s scheduled for a meeting that has been rescheduled for the Tuesday after he returns.

Dustin shrugs, “From what I remember, you’re usually up at that time anyway.”

Eduardo resists the urge to look at his wristwatch again and says instead, “You ready?”

“Yeah sure,” Dustin stands and pulls out his wallet, and from where he sits, Eduardo sees the euro folded inside. “I’ll shout this one and you do the next one, okay?”

“Okay,” Eduardo says.

The show starts at ten and it’s 9:15. They walk through the French Quarter, weave through the busy streets, bars and cafés and into a quiet bracket of shops and establishments along Chartres Street, which, Eduardo realizes with a jolt, is the same street Savoy Theater is on; one that threads through the Quarter, and links it to the neighborhoods on either side.

Dustin must know it, too, because he says, “D’you think they’ll rob another bank?”

“No,” Eduardo says without thinking and the reason comes just as simply: Mark would be buoyed by the success of their first stunt and will be driven by a compulsive need to _best_ it.

“Yeah? What do you think they’ll do?”

Eduardo’s quiet. He’s not Mark and he’s never fully understood how his mind works. How it makes its leaps and jumps, or how it comes to its conclusions. Eduardo could guess, and his guess would be that money will be involved and the amount would be gracious. But the execution and delivery…

Mark’s said that Eduardo’s lack of creativity rests on the fact that Eduardo allows himself to be buffered by _rules_. That the box had four sides and a top and a bottom.

Eduardo’s response was that he had never been hauled up by Harvard head of security about breaking the rules.

The argument had ended there, but Mark acted like he won and Eduardo had let the matter slide.

It’s their fundamental difference and why it hadn’t worked out: they could never see eye-to-eye.

The realization comes fully-formed in the haze of the New Orleans night; through the gauzy lights that filter from open windows and the sodium lamps overhead, through the slap-bass that chases them through the French Quarter and the occasional stray, plastic bead that crunches underfoot.

Eduardo resumes his stride, not noticing he stopped until Dustin pulls ahead. He feels uncomfortable, thoughts oddly shaped in his head, but doesn’t say anything.

They reach the venue as the doors open and watch on the opposite street as the crowd jostles to be the first in. After a while, Dustin continues and Eduardo steps after him.

Dustin nudges him further up the street, a jab of the elbow against Eduardo’s side. 

“Hey,” Dustin says. He points with his chin, “You think those cops are there to spring ‘em?”

Eduardo looks. He had missed the cars, some marked and others sleek and black with red and blue blinking on the inside dash. He sees the shadow of officers at the wheel, and the ambient orange of the streetlight catches the ring one of them wears.

There’s a man leaning against the hood of the car, thumb pressed against his mouth as he watches the crowd ahead. Most of his face is in shadow, but it’s easy to understand the tight lines of his body: he’s ready to spring.

Dustin peels off not long after, enamored with the food and the drinks and the people, and he calls out to Eduardo that he’ll see him later and not to wait up. A woman’s arm loops around Dustin’s neck as he says this, and Eduardo catches the edge of her smile and the way her hair frames her face before he answers, ‘yeah, okay’ the same time she asks, ‘do you want to come, too?’

Eduardo smiles and shakes his head.

*

It takes Eduardo half an hour to lose himself in the back streets, skirting Tremé, where the store fronts and nearby houses are dark and quiet, isolated from the hub of noise with the Savoy Theater at its heart. He weaves through the streets like a stray cat; stops and starts and turns around, not sure where to go, but needing to move and not wanting to go far.

Eduardo turns back when he sees the edge of a lace curtain flicker; when he imagines a young woman glancing out at him, wide neck of her tee slipping off her narrow shoulder, hand tight around her cell, and he aims towards the dome of light and sound as he traces his steps back.

The blend of laughter, screams and music pick up as he draws close and Eduardo attempts to pick out the riffs and fails because he doesn’t have the ear for it.

He ends up missing it the first time, only catching the tail end over a rendition of Born on the Bayou, but it comes clear the second time: STOP. 

Another scream follows the command and it propels Eduardo into a clipped jog. He glances over a terrace, eyes skimming the concrete walls that frame him and where small fronds of leaves peek from between the brickwork and—

It’s a dead end. 

Eduardo studies the concrete wall and is about to turn when someone scrambles over the top.

(for our final trick tonight—)

And everything fades to the background, dismissed and unimportant, as Daniel moves slow, careful; hands up and palms open — until he jumps into the narrow alley, where he slides a hand down his chest to check he’s in one piece and starts—

—And stops.

Eduardo tracks Daniel from his eyes to his shoes and back up again. 

Then, after two years of Mark missing on top of the aftermath of Facebook, Eduardo says, “I didn’t know you liked magic.”

Mark doesn’t even bother to deny it. He raises his hands, waves them around a little and goes, “Ta-da,” like it’s no big deal that he’s been caught out. 

He glances back over his shoulder and Eduardo follows the look. 

No one has followed them and to this Mark exhales, runs a hand through his hair and says, “Come on.”

He brushes past Eduardo, eyes fixed forward, and Eduardo hesitates, then follows, chasing Mark up the streets he had come through.

The pace is quick and Mark’s silent, breathing hard through his nose and _right there_. 

Eduardo’s attention keeps sliding back to him, half in shadow, hair neat and face unshaven; designer stubble and not the patchy, blond spikes of Mark after a three day coding streak.

“Mark—”

“Not right now, Wardo.”

Eduardo grabs Mark’s arm without thinking. “Not right now?” he says.

He digs his fingers into the thick material of Mark’s suit sleeve — the sort of suit Mark never bothered to put on during their dispositions — before he shoves Mark’s arm away. “You disappeared for two years.”

“I know,” Mark gives Eduardo a look. “I was there.”

“You—” Eduardo’s not even sure where to start and is left to catch up when Mark forges ahead.

Mark glances over his shoulder every so often as they walk. The farther they go, Eduardo notices, the more he hunches in on himself, until Daniel disappears and it’s just Mark. It’s disconcerting to watch how easily he transforms.

The whoop of a siren cuts through the night and Mark freezes, angles his head to figure out where it’s headed before continuing in less of a pace.

It’s obvious that Mark isn’t going to volunteer anything and so Eduardo starts again, “Mark.”

“Yes.”

“Dustin,” Eduardo says, “what did you do?”

Mark slants a glance at him. “I asked him if he had ever been hypnotized.”

“Okay.”

Mark shrugs. “And then I asked if he wanted to try it out.”

Eduardo grabs Mark’s elbow and forces them to another stop. “Is that even _legal_?” the word flattens under his tongue and is pushed between his teeth, tight and angry.

Mark jerks his elbow away and says, “It was consensual, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Eduardo doesn’t move. “Mark,” he says, “we need to talk.”

And Mark surprises him by saying, “Yes, we do.”

*

Mark takes them on a loop, flung wide before cutting back toward the French Quarter. By then it’s quiet, and on the dark ribbons of street carved in the hollow of silent houses, it feels like they’re the only living souls in the entire city.

Eduardo focuses on the shape and shift of their shadows as they walk, how they stretch out in front after they pass under the lamps before snapping back.

He’s never really been to Louisiana before, not outside of business, but knows a little of it’s history, steeped in culture and superstition. Haint. The word bright and clear in his head. Haint blue. He looks to the houses and tries to see the colors tucked under the porch ceilings. The limited light makes it hard, but there’s one or two porch lights on that grant Eduardo a glimpse of the soft blue-green, designed to ward away bad spirits.

The walk creeps into a second hour and Eduardo starts to ache, eyes burning. Mark doesn’t seem to feel the same things, hands tucked into the pockets of his slacks as they continue, relaxed.

Eduardo wonders if he still wears his hoodies when he’s Daniel.

If Henley or Jack had ever seen the soft gray pullovers that Mark lived in during Harvard, the cuffs frayed and the knot of the drawstring chewed flat. The thought travels, warm and familiar things framed by quiet smiles and the comfort of Mark’s bed, until they slide into: had they ever had to wait in the rain for an hour for someone who never showed. And: had Mark ever screwed them over.

Mark looks good with his hair straight. Eduardo fixes on the thought instead of the way his heart beats in his chest and how his nails leave half-moon imprints on the palm of his hands. He wants to look at Mark, maybe find the answer — any answer — in his face, but he can’t bring himself to do it; doesn’t trust how he will react if he sees that Mark is impassive.

There’s still a lot of pain there and he’s buried it, but not very well. It comes out of the ground like spikes, crunches beneath his feet like glass and it cuts when he tries to handle the soft parts around it.

They arrive at Mark’s hotel at 2 AM. The concierge has to buzz them in. It takes the man at the desk a while to notice them, and it’s only when Mark starts tapping on the glass that he looks over. His eyes are fuzzed out, movements sluggish as he reaches to stab the door open, suggesting he’s new to the shift.

It’s similar to the glazed look of college, the pressure of work and school and a social life. Eduardo doesn’t miss those days and the concierge considers them mutely before his eyes slip out of focus once more.

Mark calls the elevator and after a moment of waiting, Eduardo starts like he’s just remembered something important and says, “You let the doors close on me.”

Mark doesn’t react and Eduardo wonders if Mark heard, or if he was being ignored when Mark grins. Just like that, he grins, and the hard lines of his face soften and Eduardo’s suddenly five years younger and back in Harvard, and Eduardo smiles back, natural as breathing.

The elevator chimes and the doors open. They step in and Mark swipes his hotel key card, keeps it tucked between his fingers and curled towards his palm like Daniel does his card tricks. 

Eduardo watches, because it’s interesting, because Mark had never spoke about _magic_.

“Sorry,” Mark says once the doors have closed and as the lift glides upward. “That was mean. You don’t like it when people do that.”

“Thank you for remembering,” Eduardo says.

The hallway carpeting is thick and plush. It’s probably because they’re on the top floor, two penthouses set side-by-side. 

Mark takes them to the door on the left (and Eduardo thinks, “Let’s see what’s behind door number 1,” which is from one of Daniel’s shows back when his hair was still curly and Henley was his assistant. Door number 1 had nothing in it and door number 2 — across the stage — had Henley.)

He unlocks and opens the door, checks before he steps in and keeps it open for Eduardo, other hand waving to hurry him.

The city glitters, colors soft and warm in the haze of night that’s draped across New Orleans like a curtain. Eduardo crosses the room for the balcony windows before he thinks about it, and slides a hand on the warm glass, fingers loosely curled as he stares at the wicks of light. 

Mark talks in the background, voice soft in the relative darkness and it strikes Eduardo that Mark hasn’t turned the lights on.

Eduardo glances to the short hallway at the far side of the open living space and wonders if the rest of the Four Horsemen are there, or they booked out both penthouses and split; a pair to each one. He wonders if Mark prefers to room with Henley or with Jack and then stops on the thought. There’s no point.

“We’re heading to New York City,” Mark’s saying. He pulls out a bottle of alcohol and uncaps it with a sharp twist of the wrist. “Actually,” he says, as if he read it on Eduardo’s face, or in the way he held himself. “The others would have already left.”

Eduardo keeps his expression even and asks, “For your next show?” as he gravitates towards Mark in the kitchen area.

Mark ducks and measures out a shot in two wide-mouthed tumbler glasses. The blue of his eyes glow in the dark, bright on his face despite the shadow. 

Mark looks up at him, straightens. He nudges one of the glasses towards Eduardo and then says, “Something like that,” and shrugs, “it’s complicated.”

Anger flares through Eduardo when Mark says this and his fingers tighten around the glass, tips blooming white until he forces his grip to loosen. 

“It’s complicated?” it wavers so Eduardo tries again. “It’s complicated. Mark, you disappeared for two years. You— you hypnotized Dustin,” his anger falters and Eduardo says, “I can’t even— I can’t even say that with a straight face. Magic. Mark. Magic?”

There’s a slight curve on Mark’s mouth, just enough for Eduardo to know that Mark’s laughing at him. 

Not laughing, Eduardo corrects as he studies the expression. He’s smiling. Like he finds Eduardo’s disbelief _cute_ , endearing. Eduardo tosses the shot back, winces as the alcohol burns through his sinuses and he hits the glass on the bench top hard as he sets it down.

“Don’t laugh at me,” Eduardo says. His voice is rough and he clears his throat. “This isn’t funny.”

Mark taps a finger against the side of his glass and then says, “I know. It’s kind of dumb, don’t you think? Kind of like when Bill Murray goes up to people on the street to whisper in their ear that no one will believe them if they ever mention it.”

Eduardo starts to ask if that had ever happened, before he stops at the even look Mark gives him. 

It sparks a memory in his head, frantic as he defended himself against the accusation of animal cruelty and how Mark had looked at him from across the table — the kind of look that Eduardo had thought he could understand, and then realized, too late, that he still did.

Eduardo changes tack, asks, “When did you learn magic?”

Mark shrugs. “Just something I did in my spare time.”

“In your spare time,” Eduardo repeats. 

He feels the need for another shot, and, like he’s read his mind, Mark tops him up.

He’s less graceful about it, liquid sloshing in the glass and definitely more than a nip. He takes the glass this time and holds it out for Eduardo, but doesn’t let go when Eduardo reaches to take it.

Mark looks at him steadily and Eduardo feels like he’s caught in the headlights of something large and oncoming. 

Mark says, “You’ve watched my shows?”

“Yes.”

“My street shows?”

Eduardo thinks of the last one he saw, camera bouncing enough to make him feel motion sick. Mark had been the center of the crowd, asked all the women to come forward and then for a volunteer. 

The woman he settled on was tall and dark haired and had reminded Eduardo of Erica in looks only — actions a little more coy and a lot more forward than he could recall of Mark’s short lived girlfriend. Eduardo had wondered if Mark had picked her on purpose, immediately followed by: _of course he has_.

The thought comes to the surface of his mind again, pulls through the soft haze of expensive vodka and exhaustion.

Eduardo asks, “Did you pick her on purpose?” 

Mark frowns. “What are you talking about?”

“The brown haired woman,” Eduardo says, “from your last street show. What was her name?”

“Is it really that important right now?”

“Did you pick her because she reminded you of Erica?”

“Jesus Christ, Wardo. No, I picked her because she tried really hard to catch my eye. Listen—” Mark lets go of the glass and sets his hand on the bench. He rests his weight on it as he leans forward. “Listen. You remember that show right? Because it’s obvious that you’ve seen it.”

Eduardo nods.

“’The closer you look’,” Mark says. 

He pauses to let Eduardo fill in the blank, which he does, saying, ‘the less you see’, as if he was part of the act. Part of the crowd before Mark had thrown the handful of cards into the wind and let it scatter around them. Eduardo thinks he can feel one skim against his cheek and he almost lifts his hand to touch where he had felt it.

“Don’t read too much into what will happen, Wardo,” Mark says, eyes intent, “because it’s all planned. Everything that happens is meant to happen.”

*

It doesn’t take much to convince Dustin to go to New York.

Mark had told Eduardo that the final show was an open event, like one of Daniel’s street shows — just a bigger venue (the fact that Mark had specified _Daniel_ that time, rather than saying one of _my_ street shows didn’t escape Eduardo, but Mark had continued before he could raise it. He needed to leave before the authorities caught up because it was important, this was important, Wardo, Mark had said).

The website displayed a date and a place, like both times before, and no ticket information. 

Dustin had stood back, puzzled, and Eduardo just said, too impatient to let Dustin figure it out, ‘let’s turn up, Dustin. Let’s just go’, and then Dustin had shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘okay’.

It all seems to start when they land. No, Eduardo corrects as he watches what unfolds on TV later that day in the hotel room he and Dustin had booked. It had started before that. Eduardo considers Boston and vetoes that, too, because it hadn’t started there either.

Eduardo recalls the previous night — the glow of Mark’s eyes in the semi-dark and the liquor that’s there to soothe away the rough questions. He never did get much more than, ‘it’s meant to happen’. Cryptic, like the cardboard signs people hold, edges scuffed and proclaiming the end of the world — and Eduardo can’t stop a laugh when he realizes where the thought is going — by the Four Horsemen.

Conquest, war, famine and death. Eduardo had read the mythos after finding the Horsemen’s website and had stopped there, doubting that Mark’s goal was to bring about the Apocalypse.

Eduardo considers it now for his own amusement: conquest in the ability to one-up authorities — Mark would consider that a war. 

Famine and death Eduardo struggles with as he tries to stretch the concepts to fit what Mark’s Four Horsemen has achieved to the Biblical ones of the Last Testament.

Eduardo moves off the bed and the news turns to an ad break. He unpacks his laptop and sets it up, and then clicks on the downloaded copy of Mark’s last show; the one they had missed in New Orleans.

The blanket ban of recording devices in the venue had been dismissed, viewers encouraged to record and take pictures. Mark’s ego comes to mind, but the thought lacks in venom and is fond, exasperated in the same way a close friend goes, ‘don’t worry, he’s just like that’ when the person in question does something strange in public, like maybe wear flip-flops in the snow.

Eduardo smiles at the memory of Mark’s disgust when he had done just that, and how offended he had been when his socks became soggy, weight shifting from foot to foot as if he had expected the laws of cause and effect to shift for him and his penchant for open footwear. He had reminded Eduardo of a grumpy cat, wet and hair matted flat against his head by wind and snow, scowling.

With Dustin occupied in the bathroom, Eduardo takes the time to appreciate Mark on stage, coupled with the now almost familiar phenomenon of Mark in a suit (which, admittedly, he had seen the night before, but hadn’t been the focus at the time).

Eduardo frowns as he watches Mark; a certain familiarity leaping out at him now that he isn’t distracted. A glitch in the Matrix, Mark would have called it; the black cat in the hallway. More than pure showmanship in the stilted announcements each member makes.

(It’s all planned, Eduardo recalls, then wonders if that includes the script they’re all using. He hopes so, because it’s terrible and it makes Mark painful to listen to).

Eduardo can’t put his finger on where he’s seen the way Mark moves, and it’s probably nothing. His head trying to condense Mark and Daniel into the same being and unable to cope with what overlaps and what doesn’t.

Eduardo sets the thought aside as he watches Mark create a bubble between his hands. He sends it into the audience, who receive it with a collective sigh instead of the scatter of applause of earlier tricks.

Mark creates another one, coaxes it large and moves aside for Henley to step up and into it and the applause happens then, following as Henley floats into the audience before the bubble pops — and here the audience gasps and there’s a scream or two — and she falls into Mark’s arms (and Eduardo thinks, with exact infliction, do you even lift, bro? Mark, he knows this with 100% certainty, had reserved a special dislike for the athletically inflicted — a recollection of Mark’s bony knuckles and the stark tendons of his hands; the snap-and-pop of his wrists as he rotates them the first time after coming out of a coding streak — and catching a woman from any height is far, far beyond Mark’s physical capabilities. And then he thinks, _magic_ , sees Mark waving his hands around, ta-da’ing, and then rolls his eyes).

He skips ahead to where the giant check is trotted out. It’s the same style of bank check that people use for charity, or if someone wins the lottery. Jack Wilder is the one who carries it out, grinning as he hands it to Henley and Mark who hold it between them once removed from the matching giant-sized envelope.

It’s here that the tone of the show shifts, the acting and announcements that had sounded so stilted, turn mocking as Arthur Tressler — the Horsemen’s benefactor, whom is always lavishly introduced — is hauled into the limelight and it’s obvious he’s not expecting this. 

Tressler’s face wears a smile, but it does little to mask his confusion, and then becomes clear: Arthur Tressler, the CEO of Tressler Insurance owes these people money, and the Horsemen are getting it back for them.

Eduardo had watched the sequence on the plane, trapped in the window seat and with Dustin at his elbow. He had felt Dustin tense and then realized how his jaw hurt because his teeth were clenched so damn hard.

He had watched as the value of Tressler’s bank account diminished (dilutes) — trickling away and it’s noble in it’s cause, but Eduardo couldn’t help but think, ‘fraud insurance’ — because that’s what it was, live and on stage: fraud.

The money will be recovered, and then these people will have a reason to be doubly angry at having been screwed over, accounts freezing as banking institutions work along side the police.

Shit, Eduardo had thought, hand clenched against the armrest and Dustin must think it’s because of what’s happening on screen, because he had asked, ‘you okay, man?’ and Eduardo had to force himself to relax enough to say, ‘yeah.’

FaceMash, mean and childish as it was, Eduardo could get. Screwing him out of Facebook he could get. Mark setting himself up for theft and fraud, _Jesus Christ_ , and Eduardo thinks, _what the hell have they promised you to make you do this_. Eduardo feels the pressure of a laugh it at the back of his throat. _Jesus_ , he thinks again, _if your plan after is to skip the country, I’m not letting you in if you knock on my door_.

Eduardo lets the rest of the show play out and then closes out of the video program and lowers the screen of his laptop. Dustin’s still in the shower, loud as he mangles whatever song he’s in the middle of.

He glances at the twin beds.

It’s not the best room, but a step up from where they had stayed in New Orleans. Eduardo can walk around for one, and he doesn’t have to bathe in a room with five stalls set side-by-side, steam clouding everything but the wet slap of skin-on-skin as people bathe around him.

It had reminded him of high school, the changing room after sports and the smell of sweat and dirt and the masculine posturing; of his narrow shoulders and collarbones that had stuck out far too starkly, and being jostled and shoved. Not necessarily bullied, but just easily ignored.

The shower cuts and there’s a scuffle before the bathroom door opens and lets out a billow of steam. Even from across the room, Eduardo feels the humidity and it sticks to his skin enough to make him uncomfortable. Dustin’s towel is wrapped around his waist, a bit of belly hanging over where it’s tight against skin that’s red enough to rival Dustin’s hair.

Dustin grabs a handful of clothes as Eduardo turns back to the TV, and he shuffles back into the bathroom, where he talks while he brushes his teeth and complains of the crap sleep of the previous night because one of his hook-up’s friends had snored.

Dustin interrupts his own story to call out, “I got her email!”, and Eduardo can see the spray of toothpaste foam on the mirror as Dustin says it, freckling the surface, and he makes a face.

“Clean the mirror,” Eduardo says, hitches his voice a notch because he doesn’t turn his head to say it, fixed on the news report.

The news anchor talks about a high speed chase in progress — one of the many pastimes of the US — involving one of the Horsemen. _Yeah, but which one_ , Eduardo thinks as he watches snatches of a black car weave through the streets.

Mark hadn’t mentioned a high speed chase.

The anchor’s voiceover talks about the heist he Horsemen had pulled off the previous night — about Arthur Tressler’s humiliation and how the Horsemen had evaded the authorities a second time, accompanied by footage.

“What’s going on?” Dustin asks as he joins him.

He says it just as the camera zooms in on the black Mercedes the second it rides the concrete barrier and flips, and Eduardo feels his jaw unhinge and his blood run cold as Dustin goes, “Holy _shitballs_.”

The scene cuts back to the anchor. She doesn’t know what to do, scrambles for what to say and eventually stutters out, “An accident involving one of the famed Four Horsemen has just occurred—”

Eduardo surges off the bed, heartbeat loud in his ears as he turns to Dustin who is staring back at him.

Eduardo says, “Was that meant to happen?” He glances back at the screen, at where the shaky footage shows an upturned wreak where—

Eduardo tries to recall if the anchor ever said a name, scrambles through his memory and turns up nothing. 

“Was that mean to happen?” He asks Dustin again.

Dustin waves his hands. “I don’t know! How am I supposed to know.”

On screen, the camera pans where emergency vehicles have gotten stuck in the standstill. It switches back to the station after that, news reader still stunned as she reads off the auto-cue in a pitch higher than her normal reading voice, telling viewers to stay tuned.

Eduardo turns from the TV and runs his hands through his hair. He’s sweated through his shirt, feels it sticking to him as he struggles to process what he’s just seen, trying to work out if it falls under Mark’s warning of, ‘meant to happen’ as his head loops over the three seconds it took for the car to straddle the barrier and flip.

Dustin flicks through the channels, pauses between them to discover that the driver has yet to be identified and not much else.

It’s meant to happen. 

The thought is shaky, barely able to support itself beneath two tons of overturned car. The recycled air is cold on his skin and Eduardo feels like he’s run a mile. He clenches his hands to stop them from shaking, but it doesn’t work. He runs them through his hair a second time and presses the heel of one against the beat of his heart as if it could do anything to slow it down.

He tests it in his mind: Mark’s dead, and is repelled.

Eduardo tries again, firm: Mark is dead. He’s overturned on the highway and they’re going to pull his body out of the wreckage as J Daniel Atlas, only to find out that it’s Mark E Zuckerberg.

Shit. Eduardo jams the heel of his hands against his eyes to press away the sting of tears. Shit, he thinks again.

“Ladies and gentlemen—”

Eduardo wrenches his hands from his face and stares at the TV.

For a second he had thought he was home in Singapore. That he had the TV turned on loud so that the sound could follow him into the kitchen and keep his mind busy as he prepared another dinner for one.

Mark’s hair is curly and his suit is plain black, broken by the white of his button down. Henley is at his elbow, her smile outlined in red and her nails sparkling silver in the spotlight.

“For our final act tonight—” Mark says, smiles, “we will make a man,” and he pauses, “disappear.”

*

Eduardo’s familiar with the New York City subway line. He remembers researching the route and organizing times to make meetings as streamline as possible, hoping that nothing holds the system up because he’s got it arranged to the minute.

Fourteen hours a day, he had told Mark, less embellished than he was willing to admit.

He had been angry then, ears hot as they had argued, heart pounding against his ribs. 

Fourteen hours a day with Mark in his head, Facebook in his head, cell phone shrill at his hip as he hopes that Mark’s not doing anything stupid in Palo Alto because Dustin’s been _posting things_ on Facebook. Little adjustments to his profile that could mean everything and nothing and no one has been answering his calls.

Left behind, Mark had said. Just like that. I’m afraid you’ll get left behind, and Eduardo’s heart had stopped beating— skipped as Mark continued, _moving faster_ and _Sean thinks_ , before it had resumed with a hard thump. Sean, who had opened the door, stood framed by the house that Eduardo was paying for.

It’s still too easy to be caught up in the past and, for a second, Eduardo’s angry. Angry at the half answers he had gotten from Mark, the cryptic and obviously recycled movie lines Mark had used on him the night before… but then the thought is tapered by the idea of Mark dead.

Mark’s body unidentified because the fire, sparked by gasoline, had been bad enough to hold up the investigation. No report could tell them who had died on the scene. It’s almost funny in the sheer theatrics, but then Eduardo thinks again, ‘Mark’s dead’ and then the guilt festers and swells until it feels like he’s going to throw up.

Eduardo adjusts his grip on the handrail as the train sways, rails a steady beat under his feet. Dustin looks a little pale in the white light, and his attention doesn’t seem to focus on a single thing, eyes darting around the carriage like someone with something to hide.

His hand is sweaty, and Eduardo drops the rail to wipe his palm on his trousers. Someone shifts behind him and lifts up to hook their hand on the space that Eduardo had left free. He’s annoyed, but Eduardo doesn’t bother addressing the person behind him and adjusts the distribution of his weight so that he’s steady as the train pulls into the next station. The doors slide open, lets off a couple of people and brings on a dozen more.

The train doors slide shut and something in the mechanics pops, making Eduardo straighten before he lets his shoulders slump again. The announcer calls the next stop and the train pulls into motion, first slow, before gaining momentum. The carriage is silent.

To his left, a dark skinned woman has a chunky headset pulled over her ears, and Eduardo hears the deep reverb of bass. The man besides her bumps his fist against his thigh with each beat, bobs his head and Eduardo watches until the man feels it and turns to look. 

Eduardo glances away, pulls out his phone to appear busy and sees that there’s another email among the dozen or so he’s yet to address. He opens it up with his thumb.

Tonight, it reads, and Eduardo straightens as adrenaline floods his body; palms suddenly sweaty and skin tight and cold. Tonight, it tells him, and then a time, and then a place. No different than how it had been set out on the Horsemen’s website, which had loaded slowly due to the sheer amount of traffic, Dustin had explained, as they waited to read: 5 Pointz, 9 PM.

“All right?” Dustin asks and Eduardo almost tells him, yeah, but then stops.

Eduardo angles his phone so that Dustin can read the text, and Dustin, after a second, grabs it, brow folding as he tries to find sense. Eduardo knows that Dustin checks the address it’s sent from, because he taps around the screen, finding permission in Eduardo having given him his cell in the first place.

Eduardo wonders if Mark had used his email to send it, a Facebook or something more personal, but he either hasn’t, or the hypnotizing job (there’s a part of Eduardo that can’t believe he thinks that) on Dustin was that good, because nothing seems to click on Dustin’s face.

Dustin hands it back and says, “You gotta date or something after?”

Eduardo shakes his head as he pockets his cell. “No. Just catching up with someone. Do you want to come with?”

“Are there two of them?”

Eduardo’s not sure what to make of the question until Dustin brings up a hand, wiggles two fingers and clarifies, “Ladies?” with a grin. 

Eduardo rolls his eyes.

The rest of the trip doesn’t take long, and the silence that had accompanied the passengers on the train breaks into an excited murmur as the stop for 5 Pointz nears. 

It starts small — a cough, a laugh — and it snowballs until the carriage hums with it and Eduardo feels it beating in his chest, light with the fact that Mark’s alive.

Mark’s alive. It’s so much easier to think those words, and Eduardo marvels at the way it makes him feel.

Eduardo grins at Dustin, who returns it in a wide display of teeth. Because it’s all planned, Wardo, the Mark in his head says. The words are cryptic, yeah, but that’s all they are. They’re not mean, they’re not angry. They’re not telling him that he’s left behind and Sean isn’t involved with any of this.

The train pulls into the station and everyone fights to be the first one out the door. Eduardo is not exactly sure what he’ll see when they get there, but he’s no longer concerned, because everything that happens, is meant to happen.

*

“What the actual hell, Mark,” Eduardo says, hours after witnessing Mark and the remaining two of the Four Horsemen explode and scatter as fifty and hundred dollar bills from the rooftop of 5 Pointz.

Eduardo digs a handful of notes from his trousers and holds them out. At first glance, it looks like he has a fist full of fifties, until the portrait in the middle — one for each of the Horsemen — tells otherwise.

“You do know that there’s a riot,” Eduardo says as he shoves the fake cash away. “And I’m pretty sure it’s illegal to manufacture false currency,” a pause, then, “is he dead? Jack?”

Mark’s unaffected as he says, “But it’s so obviously fake, like Monopoly. And no. I told you, it was meant to happen like that.”

Eduardo stares, because aside from the suit and the neat way he’s parted his hair, it’s Mark from four years ago, hunched on himself as he weathers the criticism; bearing the brunt of it until it’s stopped so that he can shake it off and continue. 

It’s like it’s something he’s putting up with, and not because, Eduardo thinks wildly, not because he’s just sent thousands of dollars of fake currency into the hands of people — some, likely, to have desperately needed it just as much as there were others who simply _wanted_.

“What the hell,” Eduardo says again, breathes it into the night so that the sound wisps away into the dark. 

Mark shrugs, but his expression is a little put out.

“It’s not as if we planned it,” Mark says after a moment, as if it clears him from the onus. He starts to walk as he speaks, chooses a direction at random, hands deep in the pockets of his trousers. “We were given instructions on what to do and how to do it.”

The street is quiet, the night late. It’s cool, and Eduardo’s uncomfortable in his suit that’s still damp from the sweat of the crowd that had collected at 5 Pointz. He thinks back to the way they had knitted together, the push and shove and the screaming as the Horsemen — three, Eduardo had realized with an uncomfortable jump in his chest — had projected their image across the graffitied walls of the building.

Eduardo asks, “By who?”

Mark shrugs again and it looks like he’s not going to answer. It’s not out of character; never did like responding things that didn’t fall under the spectrum of what Mark deemed ‘important’. 

Like a cease and desist notice, Eduardo thinks, or all those times he had asked if Mark was listening.

Eduardo exhales and slumps his shoulders, echoing Mark’s slack posture until he straightens.

“It was an inside job,” Mark volunteers, and Eduardo glances back to him.

Mark’s eyes are fixed forward, mouth tight at the corners, collecting shadow, and it makes Eduardo wonder when did meeting in the dead of night become habit for them.

“The guy who organized it all,” Mark explains, but doesn’t explain.

“Can you start again?” Eduardo asks. He stops, and Mark does also. “Please.”

Mark casts him a look and Eduardo sees that he’s more Daniel than Mark at the moment, his expression open and less calculated as Mark considers him.

“You know when I left,” Mark says finally, words slow, “A couple of years ago.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, “Dustin called. He told me that you’d been missing for two or three days or something. You had fish,” Eduardo recalls the panic rise of Dustin’s voice, thin over the phone line and how little sense it had made at the time because _Mark had disappeared_.

Mark blinks as if it’s news to him, and he loses the fine-honed edge of Daniel to say, “Yeah. Or something. Dustin tell you he named them all? Most of them were Nemo, except for Frank, for his uncle.”

“He named a fish for his uncle?”

“Wardo,” Mark says with patience. “Are you listening?”

It takes a second for Eduardo to process the question. Heat prickles up Eduardo’s neck and he’s about to bite back when Mark continues, “I left because I got bored with everything and, I don’t know, I found something interesting on the internet about this magic society. I thought, well, I know magic—”

“You know card tricks,” Eduardo says.

Mark doesn’t rise to the bait, says, “Yes, I know card tricks. And I knew I could get into that.”

Eduardo waits a beat, then realizes that was the explanation. “Wait— What— You created a new identity so that you could join some exclusive magic club?”

Mark sets his jaw, but doesn’t say anything.

“Holy shit,” Eduardo says as he gestures, “you created a new identity. You disappeared. You— you hypnotized Dustin. You committed theft and fraud. Caused _riots_ , Mark, to join some _exclusive magic club_?”

When Mark had been hauled up by Harvard Head of Security after the FaceMash incident, Eduardo had waited for him. He had slumped against the pillar of the building where the hearing had taken place and skipped through most of his MP3 player until Mark pushed through the heavy glass doors.

He remembers Mark’s face, blank for most part, a bit harried at the inconvenience of it all. Eduardo had made some blithe comment about girls at the time, not really meaning anything more than a cheap jab to Mark’s recent relationship status.

Mark had recounted the session later, measure of pride in the way he talked — words whip-sharp, the same way he got when Mark became wrapped up in some project — and how he hadn’t been concerned, because the whole thing had been justified. There were loopholes in Harvard security and now they’re aware of it.

And then Mark had shrugged. He had, Eduardo thinks now, years later, justified it in his head, and wonders how Mark will justify this. If he can justify this.

Mark says, starts slow, “They had a breach in security,” shrugs, “and now they now.”

And Eduardo clips his jaw shut and is about to respond when he pauses at the look on Mark’s face. He’s smiling at him again. Like Eduardo’s done something cute, and the fight leaves Eduardo in one steady breath.

Eduardo turns his attention to the stretch of tarmac before them, lit up by the orange glow of street lamps. The air smells a little damp with the threat of rain.

Once he’s collected his thoughts, Eduardo asks, “Did you get in?”

Mark cocks his head.

“Did you get into your magic club?” Eduardo calls it that intentionally, and Mark tightens his jaw before he says, “I did.”

“How’s it working out for you?”

Mark starts walking again, powers ahead before he slows down. He stops and looks back.

“I didn’t know what it entailed then, when I got it,” Mark says, “just after a show, there was a card. A tarot card. Mine was The Lovers.”

“The Lovers,” Eduardo repeats. He catches up to Mark, reaches out to touch his elbow and stops halfway. “What does that mean, in terms of— of magic?”

Mark shrugs and says, “I dunno. I don’t read tarot,” he continues, “there was a time and a place—”

Eduardo thinks of the website — white, blocky letters on screen and then smaller underneath.

“And the others were there,” he stops, drags a hand out of his pocket to gesture as he says, “Actually no. I met Henley on the street. Merritt was already there and Jack turned up last to pick the locks.”

“I appreciate the clarification—”

Mark ignores him, continues, “We get into the room, and it’s empty, save for a rose, a vase and the symbol of the Horsemen cut into the floor—”

“Yeah?”

“Henley grabs the rose, says something like, a rose by any other name, and puts in the vase,” Mark mimes this, “And then it sets off some chain reaction involving dry ice and blueprints. You know—”

As if Eduardo’s been invited into exclusive magic clubs before.

“Digitally. The suspended in mid-air kind.”

“You do know how ridiculous this all sounds, right?” Eduardo says, “who— who does that amount of work to recruit—…”

“Magicians?”

The look that Mark gives him is haughty, some highbrow expression that suits who Daniel is more than Mark. Eduardo stares at it until Mark looks away, shoves a hand back in the pocket of his slacks the same way he does to his hoodies. Mark again.

“Where’s Dustin?” Mark asks after a moment, once they reach an intersection.

The pedestrian light blinks red and Eduardo jams the button. The street looks familiar, and it takes a second to recall the route during one of those fourteen hour days, when he had become lost after missing a turn and had been forced to backtrack. It looks different in the dark and without the flux of office workers, road jammed with yellow cabs.

“I lost him at 5 Pointz,” Eduardo admits, “and he didn’t answer my text.”

Then Eduardo says, “How did you know he was with me?” because he had never mentioned it.

Mark says, “Facebook.”

“You’ve been— but they traced—…” And Eduardo trails off again, embarrassed this time.

Eduardo doesn’t know the exact number of people Dustin has friended on Facebook, but Mark’s probably Aaron Michael or something innocuous like that. It wouldn’t be the first time Mark has violated his own Terms of Service.

The light turns green and they cross.

“So what happened after?” Eduardo asks when Mark doesn’t continue and Mark shrugs again.

“We learn to work together. We learn what he have to do. We find someone to pay for everything—”

“What, you didn’t volunteer your billions of dollars?”

“No,” Mark says. The word is sharp. “Because Daniel Atlas was a street magician—”

“Did the others know?” Eduardo asks, “did they know who you really were? Or did you hypnotize them, too?”

“No,” the agitation in Mark’s voice is clear, and Eduardo recognizes the way it swings up and Mark says, fast this time, “They knew me as J Daniel Atlas and that was it, okay? All of us had shit to hide and deception is what we all did best. We all knew what to ask and we all knew when to leave things alone. That was it.”

Silence settles after Mark’s outburst and they size each other up before Eduardo says, “I think I have a little more right to answers than these people, Mark.”

...But then he remembers being left at the airport at midnight and the long, hard slog to the small house in Palo Alto— knocking on the door and then turning to leave until Sean-Fucking-Parker pulls it open.

“It would have been obvious if I used my account,” Mark says and then resumes his pace. “And the plans required a specific person anyway.”

“Tressler?” Eduardo says.

The sound of their shoes ring up and down the street, and Eduardo entertains a vague thought as to where they’re going. He supposes that Mark’s putting distance between 5 Pointz and himself, maybe 5 Pointz and Daniel.

“Tressler,” Mark repeats, “like I said, everything we had to do had been planned. We just had to do it and then once we did it, we would be welcomed into The Eye.”

Eduardo guesses that this is the magician’s club, but spares Mark having to hear it again and just says, “Okay.”

“And the guy who organized it all was involved with the Feds. It was an inside job, Wardo, like I said.”

“Why all the trouble?”

Mark shrugs.

Eduardo feels a headache gathering behind his eyes, because no matter how he approaches it, there’s still a laundry list of crimes that Mark had executed for some man’s personal vendetta. And for access to the exclusive magician’s club, he adds, because Mark has drilled it into his head.

“What’s going to happen?”

Mark tips his head back like he does when he unhooks from the computer, then looks forward again. “The theft, the fraud — that’s only hurting people who don’t matter. Banks,” Mark says, “Tressler.”

“They’ll recover everything,” Eduardo’s defeated when he points it out, because he can’t believe that Mark hasn’t considered the ramifications. “Money doesn’t work that way.”

“This money will,” Mark says it in a way that Eduardo doesn’t want to question. “And then Daniel will disappear.”

“What about the others?” Eduardo asks, “I’m guessing they don’t have a spare identity or two to fall back on. And all of you are significantly famous,” pause, “and wanted.”

Mark slants him another look. “How many times do I have to say it’s an _inside_ job? There won’t ever be enough to convict them… us. Of anything.”

The headache grows and Eduardo’s not sure whether he should feel relieved or annoyed at how it’s worked out. Or if has even worked out as neatly as Mark thinks it does.

The street opens up before them, branches off into a handful of others and Eduardo realizes, with a start, that the hotel he’s staying at is no more than a block and a half away. Mark shrugs when Eduardo looks at him, because Eduardo definitely hadn’t shared where he was staying.

“What about you?” Eduardo asks, then, caught between staying and leaving for his hotel— for maybe Singapore. Leave this entire mess behind him and focus on that one business meeting that he has scheduled.

“Mark Zuckerberg,” Mark pitches his voice, as if he was an anchor on a news station. “Has returned from his jaunt as street magician J Daniel Atlas, where he robbed from the rich to give back to those who were screwed over by them. More at nine,” and then he grins.

Eduardo stares for a long moment, and then he shakes his head.

Mark doesn’t follow him when he leaves, but Eduardo’s still in earshot and he stops when Mark calls out, “Hey, Wardo?” and then, “You came here for me, right? You were looking for me.”

— and Eduardo doesn’t look back.

*

It’s all over the news when Mark Zuckerberg turns up for work on the following Monday.

Numerous reports say Mark had strolled through the doors of Facebook HQ and sat down at his desk. They say his first words were, ‘who turned my computer off?’, but that sounds cheesy, even for Mark.

Dustin calls Eduardo screaming not long after the reports surface, and Eduardo catches, ‘oh my god’, and ‘why didn’t you tell me’ — before Dustin hangs up.

Dustin then calls back a second later to whisper-but-not-whisper, “Is he Daniel?” and then, “is this being recorded? Fuck.”

Eduardo says, “I think you should talk to Mark.”

And then Dustin says, in his normal speaking voice, “He stole you.”

“I— what?”

“He stole you,” Dustin repeats and he does so with such absolute certainty that Eduardo backtracks through the last few weeks, turning events over in his head for something he’s missed.

Dustin continues, “When you watch his shows. Have you recently? Mark stole you, like, how you move and shit.”

Eduardo is already making his way to his laptop and he remembers going through the motions couple months ago, muscles tight with nervous energy as he keyed in J DANIEL ATLAS into the search bar.

He does the same now, phone held against his ear with a shoulder so he can use both hands.

J DANIEL ATLAS brings up only a handful of results and Eduardo frowns. Even jdanielatlas.com is missing. He finds a video, the low hit count indicating that it’s a reupload.

It’s the same show he had watched on TV. The same one that had followed him through the last few months, and that had underpinned his search for Mark. Dustin must hear it playing through the phone because he asks if he’s watching and then to pay attention.

And then Eduardo does see it — the familiarity that had puzzled him when he had finally noticed it in a hotel room in New York City. The grace, the gestures, the way of speaking that Mark had adopted to pass as Daniel on stage. 

It’s fumbled. Mark doesn’t quite manage it, and Henley bites back every time he slips up. Eduardo had mistaken it for flirting the first time he had watched Mark and Henley interact, but it’s very clearly not. It’s unpracticed; Mark and Daniel clearly distinct by the time Eduardo had caught up.

“See what I mean?” Dustin asks when he thinks enough time has passed.

“Yeah,” Eduardo says.

“You know,” Dustin says as Eduardo closes the clip just as Mark starts to announce their final act. Henley’s nails sparkle at him, catches the spotlight and winks silver. “This is kind of really messed up.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says again.

“I mean,” Dustin says, “like, before this all happened, before he went missing and everything, he came to me— I think we were having drinks in the office, I can’t remember. It’s all really—” Eduardo sees Dustin wave his free hand to encompass how much the memory is scrambled. 

“Anyway, and then he goes, ‘have you ever been hypnotized?’, and I say no, because. Well. You know,” Dustin pauses and then continues after a short silence. “But there’s a difference between— uh—”

“Making you dance until he snaps his fingers and disappearing for two years?”

“Yeah.”

Silence settles across the line again until Eduardo says, “Are you angry?”

“Hell yeah I am!” Dustin says it with an enthusiasm that surprises Eduardo. “I mean, he was gone and I didn’t believe you when you said it. When you asked me in— in LA, was it? You said, this is Mark, isn’t it? Only he didn’t look like Mark. Well, I mean, he did… but something didn’t click in my head whenever I saw him. Like.” 

Dustin struggles to explain. “Like I could see him, but I just didn’t recognize him. It’s— it’s really messed up.”

Dustin makes a frustrated sound and Eduardo knows that he’s grinding the heel of his palm on his forehead the same way he did when he struggled with a section of coding.

“Did he do it to anyone else?” Eduardo asks.

There’s a hollow sounding thump on the line, like he’s bumped the phone, and Dustin says, “Don’t know,” then, “I mean, who _does_ this?”

Eduardo has asked himself the same question a dozen times and every single one of them had resulted in the same answer, and that is: “Mark, apparently. How much has he told you?”

“Uh, not much?” Dustin says, “I… kinda punched him in the gut and left. And then called you,” he affixes.

“Oh, wow.”

“Yeah.”

“So,” Eduardo says, “what are you going to do?”

“I don’t know,” Dustin tells him. “I mean, it makes you wonder doesn’t it. If he’s pulled this shit before, considering how good he is at it and everything.”

Eduardo thinks to the Winklevoss twins and the not-so-subtle display of money and strength in the knife-edge folds of their suits. He doesn’t think that Mark had the ability then, or maybe it was simply the lack of opportunity. He doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know.

Eduardo looks down to his laptop, at the keys illuminated against the silver case and says, “Yeah. It does.”

Dustin swears, quiet and resigned. He says, “Anyway, I better head. I’ve gotta— I’ve gotta sort this out. All right if I call you later?”

“It’s fine,” Eduardo says and they say goodbye and hang up.

*

Eduardo’s running late for a meeting and he runs through what he needs in his head as he packs his laptop away.

His PA looks in the door, hair escaping her bun and framing her face as she says, “Mr. Saverin?” in her unassuming way of telling him that he needs to hurry up.

“Right, just one moment,” Eduardo says as he pats the pockets of his suit.

His jump drive is missing. The one with the presentation on it, and he shuffles paper and sweeps his hands under his keyboard to find it. The drawer is the last place he looks, and he yanks it open with enough force for everything to slide forward into a heap.

The jump drive is there. Eduardo swears under his breath as he grabs it, bright green against the monotone of staples and paperclips, and then pauses. He pulls the card out from where it’s half buried under stationary and stares at the picture.

JUDGEMENT, it reads at the bottom, boxed from the rest of the card. The angel holding a trumpet takes up most of the design, and it’s welcomed by a group of people with their arms outstretched.

Eduardo flips it over.

On the back there’s a time, and there’s a place.

“Mr. Saverin?” his PA asks again, and Eduardo looks up.

Eduardo pockets the card and grabs his laptop bag, hefting it over his shoulder. He reaches elevators and has pressed the button when he turns on his heel and heads back.

“Felicia?”

Felicia looks up from her paperwork.

“Could you book me a flight for California? For early Wednesday,” he says.

“You’re going to be late,” she warns, but she scoots her chair across to her computer and opens up a browser.

“I’ll make it,” Eduardo says. The card is stiff in his pocket.

 _Facebook HQ_ , it says, _9 PM Thursday 28th_ , and then: _(sorry)._


End file.
